Last month, drug company Genentech reported on the first clinical trials of the drug crenezumab, a drug targeting amyloid proteins that form sticky plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients. The drug had been particularly effective in animal models, and the trial results were eagerly awaited as one of the most promising treatments in years. It did not work. “Crenezumab did not slow or prevent cognitive decline” in people with a predisposition toward Alzheimer’s.
Last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) narrowly approved the use of Aduhelm, a new drug from Biogen that the company has priced so highly that it’s expected to drive up the price of Medicare for everyone in America, even those who never need this drug. Aduhelm was the first drug to be approved that fights the accumulation of those “amyloid plaques” in the brain. What makes the approval of the $56,000-a-dose drug so controversial is that while it does decrease plaques, it doesn’t actually slow Alzheimer’s. In fact, clinical trials were suspended in 2019 after the treatment showed “no clinical benefits.” (Which did not keep Biogen from seeking the drug’s approval or pricing it astronomically.)
Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record that makes the batting average in other areas look like Hall of Fame material.
And now we have a good idea of why. Because it looks like the original paper that established the amyloid plaque model as the foundation of Alzheimer’s research over the last 16 years might not just be wrong, but a deliberate fraud.
thanks for the text extraction, i was on my phone <3
This is actually why I think the left and right believe largely the same things about our fucked up system we are just speaking different languages!
A left leaning person might say “privileged” or “bourgeois”, while a right wing person might say “elite” but they are largely talking about the same people!
The root of “conspiracy theories” is mostly just people across the political spectrum acknowledging that power corrupts and that powerful people have conflicts of interest 🤷🏼♀️. It’s rooted in fear of authoritarianism.
There might not be an intentional, purposeful, hand wringing, back room conspiracy to “depopulate” the world, but poor people tend to die sooner than rich people, and eugenics has definitely been a thing and historically there have been powerful groups of people who have committed genocide against oppressed peoples.
No, the right is talking about Jews. Almost invariably that’s who they mean. It’s not different words to describe the same problem, it’s different understandings of what the problem actually is: a system fundamentally hostile to humanity and the world, or the (((wrong))) people occupying the upper echelons of a neutral system. You are giving the right wing far too much credit.
“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (via philosophybits)
